


just expect me to be free

by spikenard



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: California, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 05:59:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17319308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikenard/pseuds/spikenard
Summary: Adam ignored the first knock at the door.





	just expect me to be free

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is my gift for the 2018 trc rarepair fic exchange! my prompts were "adam/henry, bisexual adam, not-fluffy, possibly with mr. grey or seondeok or plot involved" 
> 
> i hope you like it, mona!
> 
> this chapter contains (pre-)adam/henry, references to various one-sided attraction/s, and to past adam/ronan. it also contains both legal medical and (at-the-time) illegal recreational drug use.

###

Adam ignored the first knock at the door.

He was housesitting for a scattered professor of medieval studies, currently (according to the university website) on sabbatical, on a research trip to France and England.

This was a cushy setup that felt more like freeloading to Adam, a little too close to charity. He was living rent free in what was an objectively nice house, located a comfortable twenty minute drive-then-walk out to a stretch of ley-line that cut through a beautiful natural forest (dotted with picturesque hiking trails) as well as, with some indignity, a golf course. He had access to the the professor’s well-maintained 2005 Camry, which ran comfortably and had no mortifying bumper stickers. On top of all that, he was getting paid for this: to do nothing more than pick up mail, pay for electricity and water, eat the food out of the pantry and freezer, and feed the house’s half-feral, combative tomcat once a day.

All in all, he didn’t have much to do: he was out of the house most days, busy with the internship he’d landed during the week or puttering about the ley line on weekends, moving rocks around or just stretching out on the ground for hours at a time, pressing his bare palms into the California dirt.

The knocking came again, harder and less polite. Adam looked up: the cat was puddled on the sunlit windowseat. Adam stayed where he was, but alert, now. He didn’t know who would disturb this house in its sleepy subdivision.

###

The gig had come from Grey. Adam had already been offered a paid internship, but summer housing near Silicon Valley was either unaffordable or too far to commute by bike. Adam had been ready to grimly sublet half of a living room — with a sheet tacked up to the ceiling for privacy and a folding screen for a door — in a house being overrun by other students. All the bedrooms were full up with two or even three people. The rent had been about what he could afford; if he scrimped with the meager stipend his internship provided and found another job right after it ended, he wouldn’t have to eat into his savings for anything other than food.

The following day, Grey had let Adam know he was on the west coast, in the states for the first time since Christmas. Adam had met him for coffee in San Francisco, holding his bike out of the way on the CalTrain.

He had cut class to make the trip. He could watch the lecture capture later, and one of the other students always posted her notes to the GroupMe.

“I have a friend who needs a housesitter,” Grey had told Adam over $8 lattes too aggressively ethical to merely be labeled Fair Trade. “Just for the summer. It’s a little out of the way, probably, but you can use the car.”

He looked awful. His hair was desaturating, ash blond going silver, and the bags under his eyes were beginning to look like natural outcroppings on an increasingly craggy face. He was moving stiffly. Adam wasn’t sure whether it was the result of his career choice or just a bad flight.

Adam had asked, “Who’s your friend?” because he had managed, mostly, to stay well out of whatever magical business empire Grey and Declan and Seondeok were destroying or reorganizing or attempting to rebuild, and he did not want to get sucked in now. He had made it out of Henrietta. He was a perfectly ordinary student, exceptional only insofar as he’d broken the curve in his Calculus class and did tarot readings at parties. The first was something to be faux-humbly proud of, and the second could be excused. People, Adam had discovered, just did anything in California. It was easy not to stand out.

Grey had told him he knew a professor on leave, who was traveling out of the country.

Adam had asked, “Why do they need a housesitter, then?”

Grey had paused for a beat, and answered, “There’s a cat,” hastily following that up with, “Their last arrangement just fell through. You can move in on Saturday,” and at that point Adam had been desperate enough not to ask any more follow-up questions.

“Okay,” Adam had said. “Give me the details,” and texted the overrun student house to let them know he’d made alternate arrangements.

###

He had, sort of, done due diligence: he’d googled for professors on sabbatical, and there was one in the Medieval Studies department. Adam had decided that was whose house he must be living in, and doggedly continue to believe this despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

Correspondence had come from a hotmail address, but Adam hadn’t thought much of that. Humanities professors used their personal email addresses all the time. Payment arrived every two weeks in envelopes addressed to him, filled with cash. Usually, it was grubby twenties, but once it had been an envelope stuffed with fives and ones.

In retrospect, it felt obvious that this was Grey doing Adam a favor. Adam was fairly sure he’d picked up a shelter cat, dropped it off at the house, and left the keys in the planter out back. But Adam hadn’t wanted to think about that, so he hadn’t. He’d been busy with his normal life.

The house did make him uneasy, though. He didn’t like to be there longer than he had to. He wasn’t sure whether it was just the strangeness of living in someone else’s house, of being in someone else’s space without their presence, of feeling like a guest or a ghost.

He was tired, and not just the tired of twelve hour days: the kind of tiredness that had plagued him his first weeks at St. Agnes, before Ronan had started coming around, before it had started to feel like half a home. The kind of tiredness that came from lying awake in the dark, listening to the noises an empty building ached out at night.

Now that his internship was over, he was at loose ends, though, and halfheartedly doing his best to make the space feel occupied: making the occasional mess in the kitchen, or spreading out next semester’s homework in the living room. But all of this was tentative. He still hadn't wanted to think about whose house it was, about how inexorably Adam was tied to his own past.

He hadn’t thought it was worth it to really snoop. A cursory look through the house had suggested that a man lived here alone; there were no photographs anywhere, and the only items of clothing left in the master closet were an old suit and some extremely dated men’s shirts (blouses?). The kitchen appliances were fairly minimalist, barring a few tools Adam couldn’t identify, and the vast majority of the mass-market books in the house tended towards airport thrillers rather than Harlequin romances. Adam had spent the week since his internship had ended methodically working his way through Grisham’s back catalogue, textbooks abandoned on the couch or coffee table.

The knocking came again. Adam thought fast, his heart beginning to pound for no reason he could pin down. He’d been living there since late May; at this point, it couldn’t be neighbors stopping by. The few packages that had arrived at the house were easy enough to drag into the garage when he got home, and he’d been content to leave them there. If there was a delivery due today no one hadn’t mentioned it, but no one had mentioned the other packages either. Those hadn’t needed Adam to sign for them, so even if it was a delivery...

He knew, though. He’d known all along, but he hadn’t wanted to confront it, to make it real. He was, resentfully, _certain_ that this was Grey’s house, and that whoever was knocking at the door knew that too.

###

If it weren’t for all the houseplants and the cat, Adam would have assumed the house had been abandoned for years. He’d needed to clean the whole house pretty thoroughly, his first few days living there. Everything had been dusty beyond belief.

Under the dust, it looked like the kind of house Blue and Gansey would live in someday, when they’d been married a decade. Adam half loved and half hated it, how everything about the house reminded him of them. Of all his friends, really. The houseplants were mostly solid, workmanlike things: spider plants and philodendra spilling out from the tops of cabinets, a bonsai, a windowbox of herbs in the kitchen and succulents in the other windowsills. None of them needed more attention than one watering a week.

Every wall was covered: most in bookcases from floor to ceiling, but some were covered in aged tapestries hanging above intricately carved antique furniture, stacked high with old copies of academic journals interspersed with issues of the _New Yorker_. There was a procession of old-looking knives — some of which were perhaps long enough to be swords — suspended from wall-mounted hooks in the hallway leading to the front door. Where there weren’t tapestries, there were framed prints and postcards and worked-metal art-piece clocks; the occasional intricate piece of decorative junk, or heavy-looking lamp, stood on a side table.

Adam got up, leaving his paperback spread open face-down on the coffee table, and moved to the doorway leading from the living room to the house’s front hallway. His heart was thrumming, stupid with adrenaline.

He felt like he’d gotten soft.

He tried to see who was on the front step through one of the little windows framing the front door; he couldn’t. All he could see was a shadowy form through the rippling glass.

His cell phone rang.

Adam dug it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. CHENG, the display read. Adam blocked the call and eased his way into the front hallway. He wondered if the knives hanging on the wall were sharp. He felt strangely calm, the initial surge of panic having quieted into — something else. He stood behind the front door, preparing to open it. Whoever it was was talking to someone — no — on the phone, it sounded like. The voice was muffled, but there was definitely only one person talking.

Adam threw the door open.

Henry Cheng was on his front step, his cellphone pressed to his ear. He was sitting on an enormous hard-sided suitcase, and had a duffel bag still slung over his shoulder. RoboBee circled lazily above his head.

“—and let me in,” he was saying, as he turned his face up to see Adam. “Ah,” he said, pulling his phone away from his ear. “There you are.”

He hung up the call. Adam had no idea what to say. Henry tugged his bug-eyed sunglasses from their perch on top of his head, and tucked them into the V of his shirt. He looked a little sweaty, his eyes tired, and his hair was deflated; Adam found this weirdly, vindictively satisfying.

“Do you ever miss flip phones?” Cheng asked. “So much more decisive.” He mimed flipping a phone closed with one hand, and made a clicking sound as he did so.

“Why are you here?” Adam said, feeling both rude and stupid.

“Why, to see you,” Henry said, simpering in what might have been intended as a southern accent. He looked up at Adam from where he was still seated atop his suitcase, possibly from under his long, thick eyelashes. Adam didn’t care, and didn’t want to notice any of this. Anything about Cheng. He wanted Cheng not to be here; he didn’t want to be reminded of anything he was missing, or of what he didn’t get to have: yearlong vacations. Blue saying his name the way she said Henry’s over the Satphone, with that little secretive smile tucked into her voice. Expensive clothes. At least Cheng looked rumpled, and not in an entirely artful way.

“I mean here,” Adam said. “Why are you _here_. How did you get this address?”

“The weather is just awful,” Cheng said, still in his possibly-southern accent, and fanned himself with a palm. “Could I get some ice water?”

“You were just in — it’s seventy and sunny,” Adam snapped, not even sure where to _begin_.

“It still sucks,” Henry said, dropping the goofy accent. Irritation was finally beginning to creep into his voice. He stood up, shifting the duffel bag so it hung at his side.

He was wearing shorts. His shirt was very tight. Adam hated the sight of him.

“I just spent half an hour digging through flower pots before I tried calling,” Henry continued, increasingly heated. “I was gonna start trying windows next but one of the neighbors saw me. I think she’s gonna call the cops,” he added, darkly. “She seems like the type.”

Adam was only half listening, though. There was movement in his peripheral vision: the cat was advancing down the front hallway with mincing steps, tail curled into a question mark and side pressed against the wall.

“Don’t let the cat out,” Adam said, eyeing it. It had gotten out once this summer already, and Adam had wasted an entire Sunday looking for it before resigning himself to the fact that he was going to have to tell the homeowner the cat was AWOL. When he’d gotten back from his internship that Monday, it had been sitting on the front stoop, both tremendously self-satisfied with the dead bird it had left on the doormat and viciously peeved with Adam for having locked it out all day.

“There’s a cat?” Henry said, craning his neck to see over Adam’s shoulder. “Here, kitty,” he said, dropping to one knee. He let his bag drop onto the stoop next to him, and held an arm out, past Adam. He was suddenly very close to Adam, closer kneeling than he’d felt a moment ago, his wrist almost brushing Adam’s jeans, his hand reaching across the doorstep, and Adam took an involuntary half step back, turning away from Henry.

The cat, of course, flitted out the door, through the space between them, and was suddenly under the overgrown bushes along the side of the house. It sat there, staring at them. Its tail was lashing.

“I’ll just see myself in,” Henry said, and stood up. He dusted off his knee beneath the neat hem of his white shorts. “Which way’s the kitchen?”

Adam stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him. Henry took a hasty step back; his heels collided with his heavy suitcase, and he sat back down on it, hard.

Adam bit down on his cheek to hide a smirk. “Door’s unlocked,” he said, and pushed past Cheng.

###

It didn’t take as long as he had thought it would, to retrieve the cat. The shrubbery came closer to putting one of his eyes out than it did. He’d had to chase it around to the back of the house before he’d cornered it; it had just trembled, hissing, with its ears put back. It made Adam tired, bone-deep. He didn’t want the cat to be scared of him. It had still scratched at his hands, and dug its claws into his shirt when he picked it up, but he’d been able to grab it and let himself back into the house one-handed, so Adam wasn’t complaining.

“There you are,” Cheng called out from the living room.

The cat wasn’t fighting in his arms, but it was a wound-up stillness, the kind where it was just a matter of time. He kicked the door shut behind himself, and dropped the cat as he locked it The cat landed on its feet and promptly streaked towards the kitchen in a grey blur.

“I caught the cat, by the way,” Adam said, lamely, as he headed towards Cheng’s voice. “No thanks to you.”

Cheng was sitting on the couch. He had moved Adam’s textbooks into a neat pile on the coffee table, the Grisham novel, still open face-down, on top of the pile. He’d fetched himself a glass of ice with a little water poured over it. There was a slice of lemon jammed over the side of the glass, and a sprig of mint as garnish. Somehow, he’d also scared up a metal cocktail stirrer, which clinked against the glass and ice as he took a sip. He wasn’t using a coaster.

“You looked like you had it under control,” Cheng said. The metal suitcase was tucked in against the side of the couch, and he’d collapsed the handle to place his bedroll there and get into his duffel bag, which was unzipped. So: no plans to leave anytime soon.

He’d also changed, his old clothes hanging out of an open side pocket on the duffel. He was now wearing ripped jeans and a short-sleeved button-down with some colorful pattern on it. His hair was once again shaped like soft-serve ice cream.

All traces of the tired, mundane Henry Adam had just seen were gone. Adam, for some reason, wanted to scream at him. How was Gansey friends with this guy? Gansey, who so valued _realness_ , thought _this_ guy, who couldn’t go five minutes without fixing his hair, was so great that he wanted to spend a whole year alone with Blue and _Henry Cheng_?

He didn’t say anything, though. Instead, Adam shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to keep a handle on the urge to tell Cheng to get out of his house.

For one thing, it wasn’t his house.

Henry pulled something out of his bag and set it on the table. Adam couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked like maybe some sort of souvenir. Like maybe it would fit in with the rest of the eclectic decor. Then Henry pulled out a toiletry case and unzipped it.

“It was my mom,” Henry said, interrupting Adam right as he had been about to say — something. Comment on how Cheng had certainly made himself at home. Cheng was unscrewing a metal tin. Pomade? Adam slouched a few steps closer, trying to figure out what the hell Cheng was doing.

“Huh?” Adam said, when Henry stopped what he was doing and fixed an expectant gaze on Adam. “I mean. What?”

“I told my mom I had to get out,” Henry said. “And she told me to come home, and then she told me to go see my nieces and nephew and sister in Vancouver, and then she told me Grey owned this place. It was supposed to be abandoned, though. I couldn’t find the key outside,” he said.

Adam had been wrong, when he thought Cheng was perfectly polished. He wasn’t. He might have changed, and fixed his hair, but he still looked off: it was in his body language, in the way his lips didn’t quite touch, his half-closed eyes, the sprawl of his thighs and how close his elbows sat to his body. He looked miserable and martyred and beautiful, like Ronan after a bad night’s sleep.

“You called me, though,” Adam said, voice tight. “You knew I was here.”

“Yes,” Henry said, voice light. He’d gone back to fiddling with his metal tins. “No. I mean, I thought you might be in the area. I knew you were in town with your internship and that you were around this summer. But I hadn’t actually been planning to impose.”

He finished with the tins, and set them out neatly on the coffee table. They were full of weed.

The lumpy piece of glasswork he’d brought wasn’t a souvenir, it was a pipe.

Henry made a vague, circular hand gesture, and set about packing a bowl. “My plane got in like three hours ago, it was a red-eye. I needed this—” here he indicated the bud “—which, it took forever to arrive, I had to leave the airport because they wouldn’t deliver there. And then I got an Uber out here, only I couldn’t find the key where it was supposed to be hidden, and then when I called you RoboBee could tell your phone was _close_. So! I figured out you were there. It’ll be nice to have some company,” Cheng said, in a tone of voice that indicated some sort of private joke.

“I thought you were supposed to be — far away,” Adam said. “All summer. Road tripping, or something.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Henry said, painstakingly polite. Adam didn’t unfold his arms, and Henry sighed, and caved, and fished a lighter out of his breast pocket.

“We made it back to the states, yes, and that was the plan. To road trip, I mean. I spent a few days in Henrietta with the whole _gang_ , minus you,” Henry said, directing at Adam what he might have intended as a cutting glance, “before I had to leave. And now,” he said, as he flicked a cheap lighter and took a hit, adding, “I’m here,” on his exhale.

Adam should tell Henry to get rid of his weed. He should tell him to smoke outside. He should remind Henry that it was, in this time zone, still before noon. He should, as a matter of fact, kick Henry out; he could certainly afford another ride to the airport and a flight to family in Vancouver, even if he had to leave his weed and paraphernalia behind. Was weed legal in Canada? Adam wasn’t sure.

Instead of doing any of those things, though, he just sighed, and slouched onto the couch next to Cheng, careful to keep a few inches of space between their thighs, and took the pipe from him.

“What the hell did you do?” Adam said, sparking the bowl himself and enjoying Cheng’s outraged face.

Adam blew a smoke ring, and was almost pathetically grateful when it came out properly. Cheng, gratifyingly, raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“What did I do?” Henry repeated back to Adam. He didn’t sound like such an asshole when he was admiring Adam.

Adam blew another ring — this one less successful — and then just exhaled. “To Gansey and Blue? What'd you do?

When Henry still didn't say anything, Adam elaborated. "To get told to beat it so bad you ran across the country.”

“Nothing,” Henry said, his half-impressed half-smile disappearing off his face and his voice growing clipped. “I left.”

Adam sparked the bowl again and took another hit before passing the pipe and lighter back to Henry.

“Sure,” he said. He got his phone out again, and snapped a picture of Henry.

“Hey!” Henry protested. He set the pipe down and ran a hand through his hair: a sweeping motion, fluffing it back upwards. “Don’t post that!”

Adam rolled his eyes. He was on Facebook because it was logistically impossible not to be at a school like Stanford, but he didn’t _use_ it. He looked at his phone, and his brief flash of annoyance deepened into something that was nearly resentment: objective photographic proof that Cheng still looked amazing, even exhausted and travel-worn.

That just about figured.

“Give it,” Cheng said, and pawed at Adam’s phone. “Delete that.”

“No,” Adam said, and clicked his screen off before shoving his phone back into his pocket, and then, as an a olive branch: “This is good weed.”

It was. Emotions were already bleeding out of Adam faster than they usually did. He was even finding it difficult to hang onto his petty irritation. All that was left was the particular blankness of serene calm that Adam had only achieved at Aglionby by wearing himself down with exhaustion til he was on the verge of collapse.

All told, Adam preferred weed.

“Isn’t it?” Henry said, sounding pleased. He took another hit and stood up, handing the pipe back to Adam. Adam let his head tip back against the couch. Henry was heading across the room, to the cabinet with a record player on it.

“Does this work?” Henry asked, poking at it.

Adam, inhaling, shrugged. His thumb hurt; Henry had a shitty lighter and he kept burning his thumb. He was out of practice.

“Since when do you smoke, man?” Henry said. He was now kneeling in front of the cabinet’s propped open. He looked good on his knees, the elegant line of his spine visible even through his loud shirt, his head bowed. The tendons in his wrists were working as flicked through what looked like a vinyl collection.

Adam took the glass of water off the table. He needed a drink.

“This is California,” he said. “I told my roommate I was good with plants—”

Henry interrupted him to bark out a laugh. “Sorry,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, realizing he was smiling as he talked. He hadn’t told anyone else that story. “It’s funny? He’s from, uh, in-state. I just meant, y’know, I can keep those little desk bonsai alive, cause he’d got one on move-in day and it was _already_ dying, but after that he just kept offering.”

“Nice,” Henry said. He stood. He was holding an album. “This okay?” he asked, waggling it. “Grey has hidden depths, huh?”

Adam couldn’t tell what it was with Henry flipping it back and forth like that. He said, “Hit it,” anyway.

###

**Author's Note:**

> title is, of course, from miss gloria gaynor's inimitable "i will survive"
> 
> thanks to kate, marie, and izzy for reading over this with increasingly short notice, to liz for letting me talk about my fanfiction in real life, and to june, for helping me figure out what music the grey man would listen to 
> 
> if you enjoyed this fic, please consider reblogging it on [tumblr](http://spikenards.tumblr.com/post/181759227529/)!


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